oday's guests are building a roll-up, and they started with an SBA loan.

Onu Okebie and Brian Boland have grown revenues at HTL Freight to $60m; they only started in 2021.

Those SBA beginnings are significant for a few key reasons:

First, it means they could start small, unlike traditional private equity roll-ups where the platform business is larger than a self-funded searcher could buy.

Onu and Brian's first acquisition, their platform if you will, did only about half a million in SDE.

Second, it means they retained 100% ownership at the beginning. They brought only their own equity to bootstrap this roll-up.

Had they raised equity to buy that first business, when the concept and they themselves where unproven, investors would have expected a good chunk of the business for really not that much capital in return.

Onu and Brian have gone on to raise equity, but they did it later in the journey, allowing them to command much better terms with investors.

Brian says the cost of that equity was probably a tenth of what it would have been had they raised at the start.

And finally, starting with an SBA loan is significant because it demonstrates you can dream big, and if you're lucky and smart and full of grit, you can build that dream off a little SBA-financed acquisition.

Please enjoy this conversation with Onu Okebie and Brian Boland, owners of HTL Freight.